


Why D'You Only Call Me When You're High?

by bluebloodnewt



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, M/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-28
Updated: 2014-10-28
Packaged: 2018-02-22 23:34:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2525804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebloodnewt/pseuds/bluebloodnewt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the serum is not enough to ease Charles' pain, he seeks other methods of relief. What he doesn't realize is that his other methods open him up for unwanted communications. </p><p>TW-Drug Use</p><p>Erik doesn't know about the serum's effects on Charles' powers. Pre-DoFP</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why D'You Only Call Me When You're High?

**Author's Note:**

> Just a drabble nagging me as I was trying to fall asleep. Title and fic inspired by the Arctic Monkey's song.

Charles had always been the talker. 

He’d always chalked it up to the fact that he could, should he choose to, experience every thought in the head of whoever was near him. I mistook this uninvited intimacy as an invitation; if he could hear the thoughts and feelings of all of his loved ones, why should they be denied of his? 

This all ended with the serum. 

Once the thoughts had left his mind, he no longer felt compelled to talk. The silvertongue had vanished, replaced by a man of few words, a man of drink, and a man of pain. The serum helped, it vanished the loudest of the noise, the worst of the suffering. It blocked the pain that others felt, and it blocked even some of his own, numbing his body as well as his mind. It gave him the gift of mobility, it gave him his legs, but it took away his mind. For a long time, Charles was content with just this. He could live with the pain that walking caused him, both physically and emotionally. He could live with the aches in his back and his legs, and he could survive the aching absence of all he used to know. 

Eventually, even that pain grew too much for him. He became weak and feeble, and sought what even Hank could not give him. He began to leave late in the night, when the few remaining children were asleep. He would seek the refuges of the creatures of the night, where he would obtain drugs that would not mask his identity as a mutant, but would relieve him of some of the pain.

His favorite by the time the last child under his care had left to war, was cocaine. He’d already learned how to find the veins under his skin under Hank’s care, and they’d become as familiar to him as the thesis he’d written so many years ago. Inhalation seemed so much less intimate to Charles, and the needle had become his friend. What he didn’t realize, however, was how the drug worked in tandem with the serum already coursing through his veins. Though Charles never could tell the difference, a high was a high, his brain managed connections he’d let fly under the radar. 

In his moments of euphoria, in the midst of painless bliss, his mind would reach for the one thing Charles missed the most. Grasping through the endless synapses of all the mind between Charles and what he sought, he would unconsciously search for Erik. Whether he be underground or in the air, in Berlin, Prague or Beijing, whether it be night or day or those strange hours in between, Erik could feel him. Tickling at the back of his mind at first, like a fly that had gently landed on the back of his neck--until he was all-consumed by him, drowning in the sea that was Charles. 

He would sift in seeming endlessness through the tirade of emotion. The waves of ‘my friend’s and the walls of ‘I can’t’s would block him, toss him back and forth through the torrents of Charles’ mind. But slowly, he would suffocate in the stillwater pools of crystal regret and betrayal, which upon the surface are multicolored and painted with the shades of hate and fury, but as he sank, became crushing with the weight of the agony that only Charles thought he could handle, but now found he shared. Equally divided, the weight was lessened, but no channel moves only one way. When he called out to Erik and bombarded him with his woes in the brief moments of distortion, he received back the same cascade of remorse. 

Every episode left Erik quivering in whatever lonesome bedroom he happened to occupy, or bathroom stall he managed to sequester himself in before the influx of pure Charles crashed into his consciousness. Years later, he found himself debilitated by the feeling of ‘not alone’ even in his empty cell derived of plastics and glasses which deprived him of even the companionship of his metal, singing beneath his fingers. 

Charles had always been the talker. But now that he was apart from him, it always left Erik to wonder. 

Why did he only ever call him when he was high?


End file.
